


The Stars and the Sea

by PinkSugarCrystal



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Cthulhu Mythos, Cult of Cthulhu, Cults, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Mythology - Freeform, Sex, Sexuality, Worship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 08:32:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16573166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkSugarCrystal/pseuds/PinkSugarCrystal
Summary: An ethereal deity brings a disturbance in the night, forever changing the lives and perceptions of two certain Oceanic-dwelling gods.





	The Stars and the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this story after I did some notetaking on the relationships of Hydra, Dagon, and Cthulhu worshipped in the Esoteric Order of Dagon as mentioned in H.P Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. While Lovecraft never explicitly states why this triad is worshipped, I was able to gather some small clues from this short story and other references by re-reading his compliation of stories that are interwoven together under the 'Cthulhu Mythos'.
> 
>  As a clarification, this is purely my interpretation and story. I did not intend this to be canon, but simply wrote it as entertainment. I was inspired by Lovecraft's literature and research I did in occultic philosophy. I hope you all enjoy.

Part I of III

The violent thrashing of the waves woke and startled the life on the soil, cautiously opening their eyes from their slumber to watch its movements with a great uneasiness. The fog and clouds of the nocturne became even darker as the storm picked up its fury, carrying the waters out from the blanket of the sea and spilling it even closer to the land. It began to lap over the polished rocks of the shores and fall further into the thick-boled forest of ferns and conifers, slowly leeching into the habitats that many land-living animals had created inside for protection. The wildlife hid and stared pitifully at the sea’s billowing waves.

However, the chaotic currents of the sea above was only a gentle, comforting lull far down below. The disordered storm of above was a mere glint in the eyes of Dagon and Hydra, who lay passionately entangled in the subterrane of seaweed and coralline on the ocean floor. 

Hydra emit a low moan from the back of her throat, feeling the quietening movement of the water pushing her closer to her consort. She arched her neck back to look into Dagon’s marble-green eyes, wrapping her arms securely around him and scraping her fingers into his scaly back as she began to gently nudge his cheek with her own. He growled quietly from her caresses, clutching his digits sharply into the iridescent substrate below them to hold him steady against her.

During this moment of passion, Hydra could sense hundreds of pairs of eyes landing upon them both, watching their movements with great intent. She felt a corner of her mouth turn slightly upward. The tens of young she and her partner had created as a result from their numerous copulations were now observing them with respect and veneration, still keeping their distance away to leave the couple in peace. 

Before she could ponder over it, she felt him moving his arms around her and pulling her into him, momentarily separating his loins from hers. Surprised by his actions, she began to coo for him to reunite with her, right before he positioned their bodies upright, near-standing. Her feet barely scraped the sand below before he wildly swam up to the surface, pulling them both up powerfully to the surface. 

She merely looked at him curiously, feeling the great volleys pulling them up, down, and forward again before he took her by the arm and guided her to a rock spire in the middle of it all, laying her back against the wet, moss-tinted outcrop. She shuddered, her neck and above exposed to the cool dry air, feeling the rest of her body afloat in the deep water. Looking at her with great reverence, Dagon aligned himself to her, gently pressing against her frame before she felt him slip into her once again without pain or pretense.

He rolled his hips unto hers, matching his ministrations with the slow progressing of the currents. Hydra pulled him close to her and groaned, feeling as the storm rocked their bodies together in an Earthly embrace. The moonlight that peered from the black clouds shone gently on the surface, bright as the thousands of scintillating stars that shone above them.

They both shuddered as they reached near their peak. Gently scraping his sharp fingers along her scaly nape, the waters pushing them even more tight against the rock, they pressed eagerly against each other in the foremost of their desire. As it struck upon them with a wonderous, hungry and climactic fervor, a sharp blip of white light shot across the black sky.

She shrieked at the sudden sight, wrapping her arms even tighter around Dagon’s frame. He had seen it at the same moment, looking up at the sky with the same fright that filled his partner. They stopped dead in their actions, the feeling of their titillating culmination disappearing as fast as the beam had come upon their vision. They kept their gazes locked to the firmament, the storm remaining a mere shadow of occurrence in the background. The point of light travelled amongst the other stars with a speed near-incomprehensible that remained visible to their naked eyes for a mere few seconds more before it disappeared once again into the distant blackness. 

They merely started at the faint golden debris that has trailed behind its path, as if expecting the luminosity to return. Hydra at that moment had forgotten about their copulation just seconds ago, and Dagon’s scaly arms wrapped loosely around her sides now felt cold and inert with an ocean that splashed against their exposed flesh. She pulled herself away from him, her attention guided up the heavens. He barely noticed her hasty separation, sliding out of her limply, a short streak of white trailing out from his loins. He examined upward with as much puzzlement as she. They saw nothing more than the stars that had greeted them before, only with a thin gilded streak that spread itself a great distance being the faint change.

They let themselves float there idly before they looked each other in the eyes, nodding to each other silently. With a moment’s hesitation, they rapidly dove back to the comfortable depths of the deep sea.  
…  
The outcome of their previous mating that one stormy night had begun to quickly take effect, and in due time Hydra found herself resting within her temple that was their abode—surrounded by fellow females that looked upon her with great honor. The many shifting months of her parturition had finally come to an end, and she felt her body contract and tense around the life that had developed within her for so long. 

A great deal of their clan had heard the news of her approaching labor, and were now waiting outside their domicile with great anticipation. The only ones permitted to enter her temple were her priestesses and daughters, serving as both midwives and servitors in her honor. They all swam up alongside her, watching her pangs.  
She buckled her hips and raised her back against the bed of kelp below her, feeling as another sharp contraction hit her. Her body gave an arboreal shudder, and yet her composed demeanor kept her at bay. The calm drift of the water around her and the caresses her daughters made along her body facilitated her birth. In no more than a just minutes later she held a pair of wriggling, healthy twin males to her full breasts, laying there in silence as they eagerly nursed while the others quickly rushed out of the temple to announce the news—quickly met with enthusiasm and worship. Hydra sighed quietly as she watched her new offspring feed from her glands. Over the epochs, she was widely celebrating as being the fertile Mother of the Deep Ones, the many in her clan being her own brood. She and Dagon had become revered as sacred deities due to their age and endurance through the years—surviving many devastating changes of climate and shiftiness that occurred within her race. Over the years, she had given birth so many times it was considered beyond second nature for her. She was now laying in the city that she and her consort had built over millenia, but in turn was put into bigger fruition by her brood—the city of Y’ha-nthlei—what had been a microcosmic dream she had spoken of one day after small ponderings was now a society in which she and Dagon were the genitrix’s. She was a goddess—worshipped for being what become instinct for her as far back as she could remember.

She could hear the excited garbling occurring outside her temple begin to fade. Shortly after she heard it completely disappear, a young priestess who had stood beside her during her labor reentered the room, bowing her head quickly before she approached.

“Mother,” she bid deferentially, “I have made sure that you are kept in peace and away from disturbance. The others have left to take part in the festivities.”

Hydra laughed. “It is only expected,” she said. “I think that’s what most were coming for in the first place.”

The priestess nodded, toying gently with her necklaces of pearls. “Many of them time it at this point. Sometimes they know when to expect conception.”

She chuckled again. The priestess smiled, her sharp teeth showing through her grin. She bent down next to Hydra and began to stroke her occupied left breast in reverence. “And there are some that say that there was something to be expected differently from this conception. They say that during your last copulation with Father Dagon, a trail of scintillating light cascaded through the sky.”

Hydra’s amiability began to fade, and began to feel rather befuddled.

The priestess could see she was rather confused. “Mother, if you don’t mind me being impertinent, do you remember the blip of light?”

Hydra didn’t need to jog her memory twice. She had remembered it quite well. It was the strangest thing to her. She had no recollection of what mating with her consort had been like in the slightest that night, and yet she remembered the aftermath of the shooting glint of light across the sky too well for comfort. That right there didn’t seem right to her. She had remembered every other time she had procreated with Dagon over the ages, and yet the most recent one was gone from her memory as if it had never existed—because of the travelling light. 

“I do remember it,” she responded to the question vaguely. 

The priestess now seemed greatly intrigued. “Do you know what it was?”

Hydra felt rather affronted with the question. It seemed that both her progeny and those that resided within her municipality seemed to expect her to know everything, and yet she, herself desperately wanted to know what she had seen that night. Her life in the world of the oceans left her without knowledge of what lay beyond.  
“Just a glow of light, like what you see twinkling in the skies at night,” she gave as her answer, though it was truly one of her guesses. 

The fellow female’s lazuli-blue eyes widened. “Really?” she asked. “But they’re usually attached with the rest of the sky. Why would that one move?”

Hydra sighed inwardly. She didn’t want to keep answering questions, and carefully aligned herself upright to free both the priestess’ small hand and the twin offspring from her full breasts. Her own necklace of pearls fell loosely to her waist, reflecting in what little light filtered through one of the rooms of her abode. The priestess backed away, and Hydra remarked to herself how small she looked compared to her own great size. 

“I need to rest for a while,” she said, laying her back against the wall ostentatiously covered in effigies of sundry marine wildlife. She raised her hand and made a motion wither fingers toward the entrance. “Leave me be.”

The priestess nodded respectfully, clasping her hands in front of her mid-section. “Of course, Mother.” Giving a final curt bow, she turned and quickly departed the room, closing the door of the Temple entrance carefully behind her. Hydra made sure she was gone before she sat upright, clinging to her still paunch stomach. Before she could stand, Dagon drifted idly into the room Even if he had not heard the news, she did not hide that she had just given birth. Laying there naked and exposed, a strand of milk drifted from her lactating breast as a plume of blood escaped her loins. He looked down at her in veneration, letting his blue lips gently graze her neck and cheek.

She curled her legs up to her abdomen and turned her body to completely face him. Moving away from the middle, she pulled him onto the bedstead to lay next to her. It was unclean for anyone but her to touch the birth frame she lay on, unless she invited an occupant to join her, in which that was always her lover. He accepted her invitation without reluctance.

“Twins,” he said. Hydra moved her resting head from his arm to look into his marble green eyes. She had expected them to be glassy with expectation of their newest arrival, as it had been in the past. This time, there was a glisten about them that indicated something distant. The loose grip he had around her waist also felt like a signifier that something was amiss.

“Are you alright?” she asked concernedly, reaching up to cup his cheek.

He didn’t lean into her hand. “Oh yes. Was the birth smooth? Are you in pain? Are the babies in good health?”

She felt he was ignoring her, but she responded to his questions with a simple answer. His sudden distance began to anger her in a petty manner, and she demanded to know what was on his mind. 

Dagon looked at her in surprise, but she held her stance. He fixated his emerald eyes on her cerulean dark ones and brought her face to still so that her gaze could not leave him. 

“It’s the blip.”

Hydra felt her insides sink. She had wanted to feel affronted, but instead she was curious.  
“I knew you wouldn’t be happy to hear that.”

She merely shook her head. “What is it about it?”  
He kept looking at her intently. 

“I could not stop thinking about it ever since we saw it that night during our copulation. I think it roused something amidst the children, because they would not stop conversing about it. I had wanted to drop the conversation, but every night it comes back to remind me that it existed. I know for a fact that it’s something…unusual.”

Hydra was now more in a greater state of incomprehension than her husband currently was. She had not brought the subject of the blip ever since they had witnessed it together, and he with her. It obviously had a profound affect on him, or he would have dropped it altogether for the sake of her. 

She knew he expected her to be angry, but she felt it all fade in an instant as she tilted her head towards his with curiosity.  
“What do you know about it?” she asked.

She could sense he was suddenly uncomfortable about all this, but something held him back from not stopping himself. 

“Nothing, but it has not stopped me from trying to know,” he admitted. “During these last waning months in the night, me and the young ones would follow its stardust path. It has left a trail of gold dust up in the sky, visible when its dark. We follow it to see where it leads us, but we always became too impatient to continue traversing the sea to see where the trail of debris ends.” He hesitated. “I was also thinking about your parturition. I didn’t want to find myself becoming distracted by something so chaste while you were carrying progeny.”

“And you didn’t tell me about all this?” Hydra whispered gutturally. “Why did you feel to hide your escapades from me? That priestess dropped a hint that there was a curiosity buzzing about when she asked me about it. I feel that it holds some sort of significance if we’re so fixated with it.”

“We’ve?” Dagon suddenly asked.

“I will admit it, Dagon—I remember more about the blip than the intercourse that proceeded it.”

She felt him tense, and she let him rest above her sans a connotation to mate. 

“It’s been on my mind, too.”

He rested his head on her chest, her necklace of pearls gently floating across his cheek. 

“I want to traverse the path with you,” she concluded. “I am curious, too curious for it to simply flee my mind.”

Dagon looked up at her with great wonder, and she simply crooned back, stroking the thin spiny dorsal-like fins on the side of his head, drawing him back down to her breast.

“I want to set out. Tomorrow after the sun unites with the sea, we shall follow it.”

They then lay there in quiet, silently accepting the fate that she decreed for them.  
…  
The day followed through as had been normally anticipated: she greeted her daughters in the procession and wallowed in the gifts and offerings the fellow Deep Ones bestowed upon her. Her newborn neonates were brought to her fertile breasts to nurse, her officiates basking near her under a white sunlight that peered through the baroquely sequined temple. She quietly instructed for one priestess to nurse her offspring as, she found herself fibbing, her mammary glands were overwhelmed with pain. She was met with great sympathy and prayer that her abundant bosom be blessed back to fruitful health. They venerated her as the great mother of the seas, and Dagon as the father who brought it unto her, with her, in a most sacred union. They lavished her and Dagon with gems and shells of the deep and adorned her with sacred ornamentation, carrying on the festivities until evening when she dictated them all to leave her and her consort be, and as soon as the golden sun penetrated the rippling tides, she and him set out into the darkness away from their city.

She did not have to push her head up toward to the ocean surface to see the trail etched of gold into the sky, a line thin yet highly visible in the night. She couldn’t help but keep staring upward as she and Dagon swam their ways forward. Their migrations took longer than a standard night as she had expected, and their journeys led them unto day. She originally wanted to stop so that they could follow the blip’s visible wake at night, but her consort implored that he was able to navigate its path even without seeing it. Her own curiosity stirred greatly enough to trust him, and they ended up in even deeper waters than what she was normally accustomed, swimming into deep, murkier areas where the tall kelp grew and the bare bones of bleached coral lay dead on the substrate. The night followed foot, the gilt dust trail visible again in the sky, and they continued traversing in its wake.

The sun had come and gone again, and by the second night they noticed that the trajectory had begun to dissipate, and yet its official end was right behind a great rocky outcrop that stuck hundreds, if not thousands of feet, above the ocean surface. She was greatly surprised to see it, and before she could ponder over it she could make out Dagon’s shape beginning to climb it, slipping against its moist, algae-coated surface as he began his sojourn upward towards the lightening, gray sky.  
‘Come down!’ she desperately wanted to implore. She had never found herself fully immersed outside of the ocean and onto the surface, nor had she felt the urge to, until this very moment. A small fragment of her mind besought her to go, and before she knew it she was clambering up the rock with him, her sharp digits digging desperately into its slick stratum, accustoming her body to the force that desperately attempted to weight her back down towards the sea. She was not accustomed to this strange, somewhat volatile force, and for a moment her heart beat furiously and she thought of letting go, and it was then she began to feel a stirring. Warm and moving inside her, like an embryo, even though she was not carrying. She felt it spread all throughout her body, and she urged herself up the rock with her husband, securing her digits deep within the monocline as she pulled herself up with all the might in her extremities. The further she moved upwards, the more intense the flood of what felt like balminess pooled within her until she finally wrangled herself up to the table-top of the spire. Dagon had already beat her to it, staring forward, frozen and silent. 

His heartbeat was the only sound he emit. She croaked with concern, but soon her gaze trailed to where his was located, and she too fell still.  
As the last of the dark sky began to dissipate, the sun’s corona rising in the East to illuminate the gray sky, the blotting of the gilded trail began to dissipate away with the night’s imminent departure. It mattered none, as the trail had ended, and seated below where its final glimmer had stroked was a tall alien being seated within an alcove stroked with luminescent colors.

She stared forward and looked with great intent. Her insides roused. It sat with great confidence on its throne of layered reds and browns, carved neatly into the niche of the rock with a meticulous precision, etched with scenes of oceanic wildlife. She paid little attention to the detail as she was merely focusing on the stature of the being, itself. The entity’s face was surrounded by a mass of feelers that fell to its waist, bearing it a resemblance to the tentacled mollusks she saw swimming around when she ventured into deeper, more subterranean depths. What she noticed forthright about this being’s appearance were the adornments decking its body—minerals and jewels she had never seen bestowed before her festooned in shimmering garlands of brass blues, greens, and pigments between these two swayed around its neck. Lustrous metal bracelets engraved with curlicues and other calligraphy wrapped around the wrists, lower arms and calves. Its sea-glass colored flesh beaded with the moisture that carried in the wind from the wallowing sea below.

She shuddered. The being slowly blinked its orange eyes—the same orange as the hardened drops of resin it had wrapped around its arms—and watched them with a piqued silent curiosity. 

She didn’t dare move. It was then it stood upright. Drops of ochre gamboge and thin, crinkly leaves from plants she had only spotted on the mainland encircled the being’s waist, along with more finely carved metals that tittivated the being’s thighs. The entity spread his limbs to the sky, moving his head back as she saw him spread the chitinous wings on his back—the color of copper when it was left exposed to the ocean air for two long. Streaks of guild and bronze tinted his body when light fractured across him, as if he was made of metal. Compared to her own frame, she felt wholly inadequate. 

“Who are you?”  
The being seemed to take the question into consideration, and she realized that he seemed to be understanding them, though she wished she could say the same for herself. His response was a linguistic jumble of soft whispering combined with a deep glottal rumbling with a strange clicking that she felt her own organs could not mimic. It carried itself with otherworldly beauty yet was pronounced like a sound that rang from deep within the Earth. She looked up at this being and wondered if it was possible he was an amalgamation of both, or maybe neither one.

His voice then pierced her ganglia within, giving it a familiar tone that comfortably intermingled with the language she had spoken with the Deep Ones for millennia. She let herself be still as his language amalgmates inside his mind with hers, creating a balance within that let her put together the phonology of what he called himself.

V

K’luhl-hloo

So it was said, and that was the nearest approximation she and Dagon could both come to. 

It was then the being had decided to continue speaking with them.

They hardly understood, struggling to place their own morphology and semantics with his own, yet they intended to listen keenly to what he had to say.  
K’luhl-hloo had come from another world—many, many aeons away, from a patch of cosmic dust that was unrecognizable in their little microcosm of the universe. He had come to build a city, one like he had dreamed of building on his home world, and yet he wanted a place of a more different climate. K’luhl-hloo himself carried the occupation of being a high priest, and yet his explanation of who he was a priest for was completely lost on both Dagon and Hydra. They had thought that they were the only deities worshipped on this Earth, and yet this talk of other gods and beings of higher-power was only muddling to them, and K’luhl-hloo’ s explanation of the concept of other godly beings was only confusing them further. Hydra gathered the indication that the being realized they weren’t understanding these concepts of ‘other gods’, when he stopped himself.

K’luhl-hloo wanted them to speak. 

With much faltering, disagreeing, and philological intricacies, they told him about the city of Y’hanthlei and the steep underwaters structures that spiraled out of grottos of seaweed and coral reefs resplendent in color. They told him about their race, and they included the fact that they, themselves were worshipped as primordial deities of nature and fertility. K’luhl-hloo seemed particularly intrigued by this fact, but let his curiosity show with a glitter in his eyes. Hydra talked about her motherhood, whilst Dagon brought up his paternal benefaction. 

They both felt derisory compared to the behemoth notions K’luhl-hloo had shared to them—and yet inquisitiveness stirred within them. They wanted K’luhl-hloo to tell them about the universe, about other life, about what was outside their notions of the sea.

Dagon clutched Hydra’s hand in his, and the two began to bow. They didn’t even hesitate to ponder the bowing to another divinity, other than the warmth that grew within them began to spread like breaching limbs, and it felt more primal, more right, than how they felt before.

They genuflected to him as the sun rose into the sky, offering to him the jewels off their own backs as tokens of reciprocation and honor. They removed their pearls and orange topaz and flung it out in front of them, landing at K’luhl-hloo’s feet. The entity looked down at these offerings in silence, reflecting over these abundances of the Earth before he slowly picked them up, and slipped them over his head. They watched as the offered gems fell down the entity’s facial feelers, down over his upper body before settling around his gracefully decked hips. They said his name, saying it in repeat until their voices were hoarse with the bitter saltiness of the wind. 

When his name had been uttered a final time, he approached them closely, towering many miles over their kneeling forms, and brought his hands to meet theirs.  
Without verbal exchange, they knew what he wanted.

Watching as the sun dipped once more into the rollicking waters, they made their way into the foaming sea back to their city of Y’hanthlei.


End file.
